V
There is the embodiment of dreams in this work,
red queen mating with white king
and their offspring the dragon
coiled like the land’s own chakra.
Between the unredeemed pledge
and the dreadful judgement,
our generation is woven
into such language as belongs to us,
dreaming these erotic dreams
of pantomimes and Mister Punch,
of utopias and dystopias.
We, who are haggling with destiny,
salute the night and the crossed wire,
sources of our Nile and our Amazon.
Poetry ruins everything,
and it’s a turbulent scenario
that we’ve been dropped into,
we ambiguous creatures
in search of a metaphor
and a stiff drink. “Qui regarde
le soleil? Personne ne regarde plus le soleil”.
The streets are there to be stumbled through,
dimly, unable to break the code
that our siblings designed with such charm
and artfulness to defuse us utterly.
The war may be over already,
and if so we were on the losing side,
drunks and invalids begging for alms
and going from empty pub to empty pub
with our bowls of blood
and our rolling eyes.
What cadence we have,
what a cluther of images.
The first rains of autumn roll over us
and we are touched by our mortality.
(This never happened,
and you who look back at us
must dig through strata of narrative
to create the truth.)
There are lava mares in glinting skirts
running beneath our feet,
and the fisher’s evidence suggests
that dealers have a home advantage
in this long game of wounds
that we’ve been playing.
We’ll have long enough to sleep
when the cameras are turned off.
I’m remembering some of the proverbs
that my grandfather taught me
on chilly nights in the lee of anarchy.
“Don’t try to fool the Borgias
with a feather pillow.
Never trust a gangster
to change the taps.
A red shirt will always offend”.
I’ve pitchforked that advice
into social gatherings
as if it makes my gaucheness acceptable
and a sigil of wisdom.
Living in a town where blue lights and red lights
clash like angry cats or the wail of panpipes;
where I can feel like a Russian in winter,
drinking sap from the birch trees;
I know what it is to live in the catacombs
of lost artists, a clumsy dance consisting
of clocking in, clocking out,
that infiltrates each season.
I am the son of fortune
processing around the lemniscate
as if this might change all timetables,
being the centrifuge of deep revolt.
And the Two of Pentacles is a key
to surviving here, the juggler’s intent
To pirouette on the shoreline
a compromise between the arts
and physicality. Only the magpies
comprehend all the mysteries of this genius loci
that lies among oak trees and scrapheaps;
here, where the wolves of Albion circle
through streets littered with the shards of broken bottles;
here, where the garden slides down
into a slurry of concrete and despair;
here, where we must find living space
alongside our own ghosts;
here, where our blood is a grey river
flowing forever to the sea;
here, where we are the hostages
of chance and our own fatalism.
Yet the sacred belongs to us,
in this temple of barking dogs.
Sacred are the street corners
and the supermarket aisles.
Sacred are our conversations,
our gossiping, our greetings.
Sacred are our orgasms
and our most secret fantasies.
Sacred are the staggering drunks,
the beggars and the buskers.
Sacred are the seventh pint of beer
and the doner kebab.
Sacred are the sirens
and the haberdasher’s shop.
Sacred is the elderly woman
with her inappropriate pigtails.
Sacred are the immigrants
and all the tangled tongues they speak with.
Sacred are the strains of karaoke
and pub musicians late at night.
Sacred are the burning men and bogmen,
and the sellers of white heather.
Sacred are the bare knuckle boxers
and the bow-legged terriers.
Sacred are the poets and the painters,
the photographers, the bums.
Sacred are the memories of dockyard horns
and riverside workshops.
Sacred are the hardships of our mothers and fathers,
the scars that they carried.
Sacred is the street litter
and the streetlamp’s soft halo.
Sacred are window-sills, pigeons,
weeds in the pavements,
mothers leading their children,
the humming of endless wires,
the sounds of birds and laughter,
my grandfather’s elegant lies,
dreams and elegies,
the road and the reaching sky,
the wind through autumn leaves,
the susurration of waves,
the falling of snow
onto city rooftops.
This being the religion
of pseudonymous brides
wearing their shabby gowns
like notary documents.
Exiles trailing our grievances behind us,
we blundered into it,
not knowing the difference
between a hawk and a handbag.
Now we are falling into night,
draped in the burned flags of our forebears,
and this will become the convention
to which we hold in these hard times
that rattle at our doors like bandits.
Blood will not bind us,
brothers duelling with sticks
in the afternoon light,
as we are watched by bucolic gatherings
of good shepherds and lusty milkmaids.
We might find ourselves on the road
to Ravenna or Timbuktu,
disguised as washerwomen
and not a farthing between us
with which to pay the ferryman.
But that is fate, and that’s all folks,
nobody is able to dictate the ending.
“Bribery and corruption, however,
keep people’s mouths shut,
their willingness to cooperate open”.
I might end up in a certain establishment,
grubby deals, Masonic handshakes,
backroom meetings behind closed doors.
That way, there are few witnesses;
sex, madness and business demand some privacy.
My father’s house is falling
but I have seen the launch of angels,
a bright light rushing on the stairs;
the truth is, we are travelling
along a path lined with wooden horsemen,
stalking panthers, the essence of maternity
forgotten so that only this urban arena
remains to us, bedded in corruption.
I am an only child, brother,
as we stay huddled in the trenches
of an imaginary war.
Sacred is the river
that flows between us.
Threats of violence, rain without clouds,
this is the world we are living in
with its shutters closed tight
and lips sealing in vile curses,
such ancient feuds and hatreds we’ve initiated
over the price of grass.
Ever since my grandfather brought home
the carcass of a white horse
that he found on the border,
I’ve been trapped in this jurisdiction,
wrestling in stolen arguments
and playing to a loaded set of rules.
Yet there’s a redhaired woman
who is wandering through my dreams,
and I’ve not found her in all my questing;
that vision still obsesses me
and makes my time here ineffable.
I’m writing a cantrip to summon her,
we’ll sail together to Kalomera
where we’ll raise a company of feral children
in the deepest caverns
among wyverns and barbarians.
Where the light will no longer touch us with madness,
and the last dragoons have ridden away
in a flurry of bugles and pennons.
Where the heads of the insane
are hidden in clouds of black smoke
billowing from the funeral pyres
of a thousand rich widows.
How many guns to shoot an unarmed man?
That is the question on the writhing tongues
of tailless lizards, the erotic game
of tyrants and Popes.
They would gather up the crying children,
preserving them in amber or aspic
until the clock strikes the alarm of empire
and terror breaks free.
Yes, we must voyage to the shore of dreams,
the redhaired woman and I,
fusing our bodies into one whole
as we sail like black swans in our hedonism,
as we fold ourselves into the poetic.
The New Life 